We introduce a facial animation system that produces real-time animation
sequences including speech synchronization and non-verbal speech-related
facial expressions from plain text input. A state-of-the-art text-to-speech
synthesis component performs linguistic analysis of the text input and
creates a speech signal from phonetic and intonation information. The
phonetic transcription is additionally used to drive a speech
synchronization method for the physically based facial animation. Further
high-level information from the linguistic analysis such as different
types of accents or pauses as well as the type of the sentence is used to
generate non-verbal speech-related facial expressions such as movement of
head, eyes, and eyebrows or voluntary eye blinks. Moreover, emoticons are
translated into XML markup that triggers emotional facial expressions.